Sestina at the End of Socialism
We watch the workers walk away, We hear a time-clock punched in time.
The whole account is in the red But not much in the shops today. Ruin is coming like a rhyme. The party is as good as dead.
The leadership as bad as dead, Frightened and too old anyway. A gut that rumbles makes a rhyme For something being sick in time. Old men wake up to dread the day, The mockery of dawn is red.
'The People's Flag is crimson-red, It flutters o'er our martyred dead' We shall not sing that song today. Massed choirs no longer voice the way Men massed might make a sense of time Surpassing reason with a rhyme.
A dogma ruthless as a rhyme; The sodding tundra sodden red, Kulak and gulag, slime and time, Purge/urge, the duty to be dead. Ten million roubles bet each way. The lads are eating horse today.
It could be my last day today — Young Rubashov will know the rhyme Eternity might shrug away.
The girls were young, the wine was red, And hardly anybody dead.
Perhaps there'll be another time.
At some small rotting point in time This is the end of yesterday; A future waiting for the dead. The rhyme is only there to rhyme, The autumn comes, the leaves turn red, Ungood the leaves are blown away.
Tick-tock, Ingsoc, a load of rhyme.
Expletive day, deleted red.
Dead end. Dada. Go out this way.
Matthew Mead
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